Biometrics is inherently flawed as an authentication system, because biometrics is a password you can't change. Once someone gets your password, or at least the numerical representation of it such as could be lifted from a compromised reader or database, you are toast. How are you going to change your retina scan to something new?
And never mind the demonstrated hackability of all but the premium readers.
Biometrics sound great at first blush, and to the common voter they seem foolproof, so this fad will get worse before it will get better. In fact, the authentication issue may have achieved the level of complexity as the net-neutrality issue, such that Joe Registered Voter cannot possibly understand it (even if he is the rare sort to spend an hour googling it before forming an opinion).
Meanwhile, text passwords plus certificates (where 'certificate' could be a smart card, or your cellphone's IMEI, or whatever) is still the answer for security. It's awful, to be sure, but it's much less awful than biometrics.
Yes, I agree totally here! Furthermore, there's a worrying increase (on UK roads at least) headlamps with a *nasty* blue tint to them. I've no idea what they're called but they *really* screw with my eyes, mostly on BMWs and boy racers. Night vision gets all messed up and there's noticeable scarring (after image) - anyone know what the bulbs are?
You laugh, but this was a tricky achievement. The satellite doesn't have an infinite number of reflecting surfaces. Therefore, a single photon fired at it must not only hit the satellite accurately, but it must be lucky enough to strike a reflecting surface that happens to be at the precisely correct angle. If the angle of incidence is not 90.000 degrees, or whatever exact precision, then the photon will miss the receiving antenna back on the ground.
Since the transmitter can't control the satellite's attitude, it would've had to have fired a stream of single photons at it, patiently waiting for one to get a lucky angle of incidence and thereby make it back home.
So, the overall achievement is both larger and smaller than the headline suggests: they had to get the angle ridiculously perfect, but they also had to fire a vast number of 'single' photons in order to do so.
"So", said Arthur, hoping he wasn't sounding ridiculously obtuse, "why don't people get rid of the lizards?"
"It honestly doesn't occur to them", said Ford. "They've all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they've voted in more or less approximates to the government they want."
"You mean they actually vote for the lizards?"
"Oh yes", said Ford with a shrug, "of course."
"But", said Arthur, going for the big one again, "why?"
"Because if they didn't vote for a lizard", said Ford, "the wrong lizard might get in."
Fascinating. I just realized what this means: democracy is a free-rider problem. No one will vote to install a proper candidate because everyone is afraid that the other side will then win the right to install their preferred flavor of fascist. Under the threat of a fascist, the safest thing to do is install a fascist who will reward one's political group at the expense of the others.
Only if we could all agree ahead-of-time to *not* vote fascist, could we kick all the lizards out.
That will never happen, because the payoff for being a free-rider depends on how many other free-riders there are. The fewer the hawks, the bigger the payoff for being a hawk. That is to say: if everyone else elects for their congressman a dove, willing to forego pork for his district in the hopes that *everyone* will forego pork for his district, willing to stop passing controls against the other side in the hopes that *everyone* will forego controls on their opponents, then the payoff is huge for the one guy who *does* grab all the pork and pass the controls.
I always knew democracy was doomed to a death-spiral of spending and controls, but now I finally see why it's unavoidable. Free-rider problems normally can only be solved by state intervention -- and there is no state intervention when the state itself is the one caught in a free-rider problem.
[...] And let's not forget how they control free speech, although people seem to have largely forgotten about that in the midst of this economic boom.
[...]
One thing China does have is a lot of nationalistic pride. [...]
How would you know if they didn't?
I guarantee you this: lower the firewall, end all censorship and crackdowns, set up livejournal.cn, and then you'll see what they really think of their country and how it is run.
Probably because it is classed as a "Cult" and not a "Religion" due to the secretive nature of the core teachings, ceremonies, inner workings, etc, etc.
As far as I can see of how people actually use the terms 'cult' and 'religion'...
It's a cult if its founder is still alive, or is recently dead.
It's a religion if the founder has been dead so long that his adherents have had time to rewrite his character.
(In no case is any of it rational, practical, or efficient. Religion is for those who are insufficiently honest to build their own philosophy.)
A cult, in other words, has elements of personality-worship in it. Religions are old enough to claim that the founder's personality could not have unduly influenced their membership.
This is why Mormonism, whose founder Joseph Smith is now dead ~140 years, is finally shedding its cult status.
100 years from now. Do you thing proprietary software has a chance in hell? It just is not sustainable to have every business, school, and government paying 1 provider of software for an operating system.
Through sheer luck, your grandson's slashdot post from the year 2108 has fallen through a wormhole and arrived here in 2008. He wrote:
100 years from now. Do you thing open-source software has a chance in hell? It just is not sustainable to have every business, school, and government paying different providers of software for different forks of different flavors of operating system.
... is that the only character that follows clear moral principles is karl "helo" agathon; every other character on the show has obvious flaws (which are necessary to create tension), but he is the only one that does what he deems right without doubt.
As a general rule, such behavior implies that Helo is the least sophisticated, and therefore perhaps the most susceptible to concrete-bound Bible-thumpish behavior. If you are in a major conflict and find yourself pursuing 'right' without doubt, then your head needs examined.
It's the same idea as we see in CS. The most qualified people I know, are in constant doubt whether their skills are up to the challenge. It's only the fool that is sublimely certain of his abilities... and who then blunders into the code and sublimely breaks backwards-compatibility.
I am not arguing for Scepticism, or any other form of uncertainty-as-an-end-in-itself. Far from it. I am just making the point that other than religion (which is cheating), constant and easy moral certainty is hard even during peacetime.
Among geeks like us, product placements in a 'sacred' forum like Slashdot are a Big Deal. I recently bought a very nice smart battery charger from Thompson based on the (modded +5) recommendation of another poster. And I'm so thrilled with it, I bought more of them to give as Christmas gifts. At least for now, my brain assigns Slashdot items an automatic above-average level of trust.
Hence the pressure to grab the headlines. In a clean place like this, full of honest doves and few free-riding hawks, the payoff for becoming a hawk is huge.
And you do know that SDI was a pipe dream that tricked the Soviets into a defense spending contest that basically collapsed the Soviet empire and caused the breakup of the USSR? It was never designed to be a working solution. And shooting down one of our own satellites is a far stretch from the "global missile defense blanket" we were promised. From all the test results at trying to take down actual missiles, they had a very poor success rate. And they were talking about using satellite mounted mirrors/laser system to blast down missiles. Where is that? I'd also be willing to wager that advancement in the technology field and computers are more responsible for us being able to hit fast moving targets with our missiles than the SDI research.
The new Block III version of Patriot MIMS is directly derived from SDI's ERINT project. SDI developed the "hit to kill" technology, and Patriot III uses it (as does the Standard missile used to hit the satellite the other day). It is superior in every way to the old blast/frag warheads that earlier Patriots (including those used in Desert Storm) fielded.
Indeed, the smaller faster nimbler warheadless Block III missiles are one quarter the size of the prior versions, and so a Patriot quad box launcher now carriers sixteen hot rounds, rather than four.
More generally, your criticism of SDI for a putative absence of direct applications is like criticizing the Apollo project for an absence of direct applications. There is no way to monetize the act of moving the state of the art forward... but this is Slashdot, right? I thought we all understood this.
People who are deeply religious and who hold fundamental beliefs without any basis of evidence are not rational. And while it might be fair to say they are irrational in this one sphere of discourse, that is basically the same as saying they are functionally schizophrenic. It would be more accurate simply to say that people can be articulate without being rational. Just because a person is intelligent enough to coherently express their thoughts, as your deeply religious friends no doubt are, that says nothing about the quality or rationality of those thoughts. It is quite possible to thoroughly and eloquently articulate extremely poor, utterly irrational ideas - just ask Hitler or Bin Laden.
Well said.
Let me add another car to your train of thought:
People who renounce rationality, are stuck with only one method to judge the truth of others' ideas: by judging the speaker's articulateness.
That is why scientists need not (and usually are not) articulate: in the rational realm, it is a secondary skill. It is certainly useful, but it isn't a requirement. Not so with the irrational realm: preachers et. al. need eloquence as a primary skill, because that is how their audiences judge the truth of their words.
No where in the bible does it say that God created the world in seven or even six days. He spends a indeterminate period of time creating the heavens and the earth. Then he creates light, again no mention whatsoever of how long this took. Finally he separates the light from the dark, and the first day happends.
Frankly I give most people about 0/10 for reading comprehension.
Your score isn't much higher, seeing as how you haven't yet noticed that day and night were (according to Genesis) created before the sun was. Oops.
A while ago somebody noticed that anti-depressant drugs don't work at all unless they have some side-effects. The side-effects remind the user that he or she is taking a wow-must-be-powerful drug, which increases its placebo effect. The upshot is that it is completely counterproductive to search for an anti-depressant drug that has no side-effects. In fact, the more side-effects the better.
I don't remember more details than this, though.
In any case, it reminds me of a similar effect in microeconomics, in which consumers would tend to evaluate a widget more favorably if they had paid more money for it.
Ranger will provide 500 million processor hours to projects attempting to address societal grand challenges such as global climate change, water resource management, new energy sources, natural disasters, new materials and manufacturing processes, tissue and organ engineering, patient-specific medical therapies, and drug design."
ATTENTION RESEARCHERS:
Processing time on the new Ranger supercomputer is limited, and will be allocated to projects according to merit. Projects that aim to reinforce the current Doctrine naturally have greater merit. Projects that challenge the Doctrine, or that aim to refute it, will be placed in the secondary queue, and will receive an allocation of resources if and when the primary queue is empty.
In answer to the obvious objection: The University of Texas is a Public institution, and the Ranger supercomputer was built with Public funds, and so it is only appropriate that Ranger's resource allocation mirrors Public opinion. The Public does not like cognitive dissonance, and neither does the board of Regents.
I agree, though, that it is depressing how many more messages the ladies get than the guys (or at least this guy).
This is an ancient and unavoidable fact of human life... Sperm is cheap; womb space is expensive.
That fact explains about half of all human behavior. The other half is explained by fact number two: To get what we need to survive, we must either make it or take it.
In the first case, I'd say it's because North Korea is a lot more dangerous than Iraq. Maybe it's too late for us to simply invade them without massive repercussions. Maybe we should have done it sooner.
I vote 'no' because North Korea has no actual value. (Yes I know we could invade to end their present disvalue, but I don't give them as much credit as others do.)
Given fifty years for the old guard to die off, perhaps they might become productive and contribute something. But for now, their culture is caught in a broken pattern, so leave 'em be.
Iraq, by contrast, is floating atop a colossal amount of wealth. Saddam was wasting it by a) failing to produce much of it, and b) squandering the proceeds on a stupidly large military. That oil is an enormous productive end to rebooting Iraq, in addition to the potential benefit of hopefully establishing a more peaceful culture there.
3) Just ask GWB how well preemptive attacks work out for the US's world image;)
You misunderstand the nature of other countries' grumbling. You'll get it when you finally understand how deep human self-interest goes. Their grumbling is an attempt to soften us back up. You'll know we're getting shafted when everyone likes us and speaks fondly of us.
To put it another way... Our total cost of self-defense is lowest when other countries consider us dangerously erratic and unfashionably violent.
Sources of soft power aren't usually included in defense planning because areas like economic policy and cultural strength appertain variously to non-military departments or even the private sector. But they should be, because our competitors (like China) are.
That said, the United States has a lot of work to do to restore the soft power that eight years of the Bush administration has squandered. Let's hope the next administration is more astute and capable.
Demonstating a willingness to invade an ill-behaved country (Iraq) is a form of soft power that your ideology prevents you from seeing. Leaders like Clinton, Carter, and Bush Sr. were the ones who initially squandered this.
Also, bringing 11% of the world's crude oil back online (Iraq) is, in the long run, a form of energy security and international goodwill. Google Iraq's current oil production, and America's daily consumption, and dare to tell us it isn't important.
I wish I could say that this is not wasting resources, but it is. All these plans would not be that necessary if the USA kept out of other countries' business. But we will not leave them alone.
All countries meddle with each other to the extent they are able, for their own interests. It's the nature of humans, tribes, and limited resources.
A more relevant question is: how much meddling would they do in our country, if we lost our military dominance?
The entire world is presently blossoming in Pax Americana, in the same way and for the same reasons as it blossomed under Pax Romana. Be careful what your hatred of power leads you to wish for.
There are greater threats to USA's security than these mach 6 planes will address. Things like terror are far worse. Imagine six 9-11's on our [critical] infrastructure.
Have you given any thought to how this situation came about? Do you remember what the Cold War was like? The reason why terrorism is presently a greater threat than symmetrical war, is because nobody could possibly beat us at symmetrical war at this time. Forty years ago, though, when Soviet Union at least thought it could, the threat assessment was very different.
I would prefer to retain military dominance, such that terrorism is the bad guys' only recourse.
These plans also assume that Russia and China are sitting idle. Once again, we shall be surprised just like we were when Russia put into service, a nuclear capable missile with independent, multiple war-heads. This made our missile shield obsolete.
The missile shield isn't useful against enemies who can afford massive arsenals. Such enemies aren't likely to launch against us anyway. It's the erratic little countries, like North Korea and Syria, that might just launch a handful at us. They are the purpose of the shield.
Eventually we may learn to defend against a full arsenal. And the way we will learn to do so, is by incremental advances, and building upon what we learned from Missile Shield v1.0. Wow are you short-sighted!
This confirms to me that my president and his administration are just incompetent.
It confirms that they are operating on a different time horizon than you prefer. That alone is not proof of their, or your, incompetence.
[Life on this 'hot Jupiter' planet] wouldn't be made up of combustable carbon chains, either.
Why not? As long as there is no oxygen around, they'd be fine. Indeed, there was no oxygen around for a lot of Earth's history either... Oxygen's arrival here was as a corrosive pollutant pumped into the atmosphere by short-sighted greedy industria^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hplants and microbes.
Look, I know this isn't the popular viewpoint here, but I think I can explain the agent's actions:
"Maria Udy, a marketing executive with a global travel management firm in Bethesda, said her company laptop was seized by a federal agent as she was flying from Dulles International Airport to London in December 2006. Udy, a British citizen, said the agent told her he had 'a security concern' with her.
His 'security concern' was completely real. He was concerned that his level of financial security did not allow him to own such a nice laptop as hers.
It was really convenient in that it allowed politicians to act "green" and look like they were moving away from supporting big bad Middle East oil (which is in large part financed by American companies under American-supported governments... that's a discussion for another day).
POLITICS, n. A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage. -- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
The *entire* Internet is vastly more complex and demanding on its *backend* than its *frontend* reveals. What can be hosted entirely on a distributed network of desktop machines precludes many trusted and secure online transactions we make use of in the Internet today. It's obvious from the get go, that this will be only usable for a limited subset of online applications (like, hosting Wikipedia for ex.?) , but I guess making overly broad statements caught the eye of some bloggers and journalists.
Not to worry. The whole idea will become simple and practical just as soon as a computer's physical security no longer matters. That is what the Trusted Computing regim^H^H^H^H^Hdictatorsh^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hinitiative is all about.
Even so, I'll trust the bad guys with physical access right about the time hell freezes over. When there is this much money at stake, somebody with physical access is going to crack the box.
Slashdot Mirror
Biometrics is inherently flawed as an authentication system, because biometrics is a password you can't change. Once someone gets your password, or at least the numerical representation of it such as could be lifted from a compromised reader or database, you are toast. How are you going to change your retina scan to something new?
And never mind the demonstrated hackability of all but the premium readers.
Biometrics sound great at first blush, and to the common voter they seem foolproof, so this fad will get worse before it will get better. In fact, the authentication issue may have achieved the level of complexity as the net-neutrality issue, such that Joe Registered Voter cannot possibly understand it (even if he is the rare sort to spend an hour googling it before forming an opinion).
Meanwhile, text passwords plus certificates (where 'certificate' could be a smart card, or your cellphone's IMEI, or whatever) is still the answer for security. It's awful, to be sure, but it's much less awful than biometrics.
The nasty headlighteseseses, it burns!
You laugh, but this was a tricky achievement. The satellite doesn't have an infinite number of reflecting surfaces. Therefore, a single photon fired at it must not only hit the satellite accurately, but it must be lucky enough to strike a reflecting surface that happens to be at the precisely correct angle. If the angle of incidence is not 90.000 degrees, or whatever exact precision, then the photon will miss the receiving antenna back on the ground.
Since the transmitter can't control the satellite's attitude, it would've had to have fired a stream of single photons at it, patiently waiting for one to get a lucky angle of incidence and thereby make it back home.
So, the overall achievement is both larger and smaller than the headline suggests: they had to get the angle ridiculously perfect, but they also had to fire a vast number of 'single' photons in order to do so.
Fascinating. I just realized what this means: democracy is a free-rider problem. No one will vote to install a proper candidate because everyone is afraid that the other side will then win the right to install their preferred flavor of fascist. Under the threat of a fascist, the safest thing to do is install a fascist who will reward one's political group at the expense of the others.
Only if we could all agree ahead-of-time to *not* vote fascist, could we kick all the lizards out.
That will never happen, because the payoff for being a free-rider depends on how many other free-riders there are. The fewer the hawks, the bigger the payoff for being a hawk. That is to say: if everyone else elects for their congressman a dove, willing to forego pork for his district in the hopes that *everyone* will forego pork for his district, willing to stop passing controls against the other side in the hopes that *everyone* will forego controls on their opponents, then the payoff is huge for the one guy who *does* grab all the pork and pass the controls.
I always knew democracy was doomed to a death-spiral of spending and controls, but now I finally see why it's unavoidable. Free-rider problems normally can only be solved by state intervention -- and there is no state intervention when the state itself is the one caught in a free-rider problem.
How would you know if they didn't?
I guarantee you this: lower the firewall, end all censorship and crackdowns, set up livejournal.cn, and then you'll see what they really think of their country and how it is run.
As far as I can see of how people actually use the terms 'cult' and 'religion'...
A cult, in other words, has elements of personality-worship in it. Religions are old enough to claim that the founder's personality could not have unduly influenced their membership.
This is why Mormonism, whose founder Joseph Smith is now dead ~140 years, is finally shedding its cult status.
Well said.
Through sheer luck, your grandson's slashdot post from the year 2108 has fallen through a wormhole and arrived here in 2008. He wrote:
As a general rule, such behavior implies that Helo is the least sophisticated, and therefore perhaps the most susceptible to concrete-bound Bible-thumpish behavior. If you are in a major conflict and find yourself pursuing 'right' without doubt, then your head needs examined.
It's the same idea as we see in CS. The most qualified people I know, are in constant doubt whether their skills are up to the challenge. It's only the fool that is sublimely certain of his abilities... and who then blunders into the code and sublimely breaks backwards-compatibility.
I am not arguing for Scepticism, or any other form of uncertainty-as-an-end-in-itself. Far from it. I am just making the point that other than religion (which is cheating), constant and easy moral certainty is hard even during peacetime.
Thomas Distributing sold me a MH-C401FS smart charger, which I adore. I use Eneloop batteries because they (gloriously!) hold their charge for a year.
I've had this setup running for a year now and I'm still happy with it. I gave one to my brother and he too is happy with it.
Good luck. :)
Slashdot ad revenues are down, perhaps?
Among geeks like us, product placements in a 'sacred' forum like Slashdot are a Big Deal. I recently bought a very nice smart battery charger from Thompson based on the (modded +5) recommendation of another poster. And I'm so thrilled with it, I bought more of them to give as Christmas gifts. At least for now, my brain assigns Slashdot items an automatic above-average level of trust.
Hence the pressure to grab the headlines. In a clean place like this, full of honest doves and few free-riding hawks, the payoff for becoming a hawk is huge.
The new Block III version of Patriot MIMS is directly derived from SDI's ERINT project. SDI developed the "hit to kill" technology, and Patriot III uses it (as does the Standard missile used to hit the satellite the other day). It is superior in every way to the old blast/frag warheads that earlier Patriots (including those used in Desert Storm) fielded.
Indeed, the smaller faster nimbler warheadless Block III missiles are one quarter the size of the prior versions, and so a Patriot quad box launcher now carriers sixteen hot rounds, rather than four.
More generally, your criticism of SDI for a putative absence of direct applications is like criticizing the Apollo project for an absence of direct applications. There is no way to monetize the act of moving the state of the art forward... but this is Slashdot, right? I thought we all understood this.
Well said.
Let me add another car to your train of thought:
People who renounce rationality, are stuck with only one method to judge the truth of others' ideas: by judging the speaker's articulateness.
That is why scientists need not (and usually are not) articulate: in the rational realm, it is a secondary skill. It is certainly useful, but it isn't a requirement. Not so with the irrational realm: preachers et. al. need eloquence as a primary skill, because that is how their audiences judge the truth of their words.
Your score isn't much higher, seeing as how you haven't yet noticed that day and night were (according to Genesis) created before the sun was. Oops.
A while ago somebody noticed that anti-depressant drugs don't work at all unless they have some side-effects. The side-effects remind the user that he or she is taking a wow-must-be-powerful drug, which increases its placebo effect. The upshot is that it is completely counterproductive to search for an anti-depressant drug that has no side-effects. In fact, the more side-effects the better.
I don't remember more details than this, though.
In any case, it reminds me of a similar effect in microeconomics, in which consumers would tend to evaluate a widget more favorably if they had paid more money for it.
ATTENTION RESEARCHERS:
Processing time on the new Ranger supercomputer is limited, and will be allocated to projects according to merit. Projects that aim to reinforce the current Doctrine naturally have greater merit. Projects that challenge the Doctrine, or that aim to refute it, will be placed in the secondary queue, and will receive an allocation of resources if and when the primary queue is empty.
In answer to the obvious objection: The University of Texas is a Public institution, and the Ranger supercomputer was built with Public funds, and so it is only appropriate that Ranger's resource allocation mirrors Public opinion. The Public does not like cognitive dissonance, and neither does the board of Regents.
This is an ancient and unavoidable fact of human life... Sperm is cheap; womb space is expensive.
That fact explains about half of all human behavior. The other half is explained by fact number two: To get what we need to survive, we must either make it or take it.
I vote 'no' because North Korea has no actual value. (Yes I know we could invade to end their present disvalue, but I don't give them as much credit as others do.)
Given fifty years for the old guard to die off, perhaps they might become productive and contribute something. But for now, their culture is caught in a broken pattern, so leave 'em be.
Iraq, by contrast, is floating atop a colossal amount of wealth. Saddam was wasting it by a) failing to produce much of it, and b) squandering the proceeds on a stupidly large military. That oil is an enormous productive end to rebooting Iraq, in addition to the potential benefit of hopefully establishing a more peaceful culture there.
You misunderstand the nature of other countries' grumbling. You'll get it when you finally understand how deep human self-interest goes. Their grumbling is an attempt to soften us back up. You'll know we're getting shafted when everyone likes us and speaks fondly of us.
To put it another way... Our total cost of self-defense is lowest when other countries consider us dangerously erratic and unfashionably violent.
Demonstating a willingness to invade an ill-behaved country (Iraq) is a form of soft power that your ideology prevents you from seeing. Leaders like Clinton, Carter, and Bush Sr. were the ones who initially squandered this.
Also, bringing 11% of the world's crude oil back online (Iraq) is, in the long run, a form of energy security and international goodwill. Google Iraq's current oil production, and America's daily consumption, and dare to tell us it isn't important.
All countries meddle with each other to the extent they are able, for their own interests. It's the nature of humans, tribes, and limited resources.
A more relevant question is: how much meddling would they do in our country, if we lost our military dominance?
The entire world is presently blossoming in Pax Americana, in the same way and for the same reasons as it blossomed under Pax Romana. Be careful what your hatred of power leads you to wish for.
Have you given any thought to how this situation came about? Do you remember what the Cold War was like? The reason why terrorism is presently a greater threat than symmetrical war, is because nobody could possibly beat us at symmetrical war at this time. Forty years ago, though, when Soviet Union at least thought it could, the threat assessment was very different.
I would prefer to retain military dominance, such that terrorism is the bad guys' only recourse.
The missile shield isn't useful against enemies who can afford massive arsenals. Such enemies aren't likely to launch against us anyway. It's the erratic little countries, like North Korea and Syria, that might just launch a handful at us. They are the purpose of the shield.
Eventually we may learn to defend against a full arsenal. And the way we will learn to do so, is by incremental advances, and building upon what we learned from Missile Shield v1.0. Wow are you short-sighted!
It confirms that they are operating on a different time horizon than you prefer. That alone is not proof of their, or your, incompetence.
Why not? As long as there is no oxygen around, they'd be fine. Indeed, there was no oxygen around for a lot of Earth's history either... Oxygen's arrival here was as a corrosive pollutant pumped into the atmosphere by short-sighted greedy industria^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hplants and microbes.
Look, I know this isn't the popular viewpoint here, but I think I can explain the agent's actions:
His 'security concern' was completely real. He was concerned that his level of financial security did not allow him to own such a nice laptop as hers.
Not to worry. The whole idea will become simple and practical just as soon as a computer's physical security no longer matters. That is what the Trusted Computing regim^H^H^H^H^Hdictatorsh^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hinitiative is all about.
Even so, I'll trust the bad guys with physical access right about the time hell freezes over. When there is this much money at stake, somebody with physical access is going to crack the box.